While some of these programs are classified, others have been able to share their results. For instance, the United Platform is working to push cyber offense and defense capabilities on the cloud. “We’ve been using Kubernetes to orchestrate the stack and containerize the tools we’re building for the last six months,” [Air ForceChaillan says. “Unified Platform has been very successful with delivering rapid iterations of containers.”
The Navy’s Compile to Combat in 24 Hours program is another example: “Kubernetes is enabling them to do a push to production on the ship while being disconnected [at sea],” Chaillan says. The Kessel Run team “is delivering value to the warfighter on different types of devices and iPads and other cool edge use cases in a matter of weeks.”
Armed with those success stories, Chaillan advocated for enterprise-level offerings that would be available across the DoD. Two teams were created: Cloud One, to bring a cloud environment to development teams, and Platform One, to set up DevSecOps environments on Kubernetes clusters. Teams are allowed to choose from a selection of distributions, such as OpenShift, Tanzu, D2IQ, and Rancher.
With these cloud native technologies and practices in place, the DoD has achieved great time savings. Releases, which once took as long as 3 to 8 months, now can be achieved in one week. An ATO for a cloud enclave can be obtained within one week, plus “we have a continuous ATO on the platform stack,” says Chaillan. “Anytime software passes the testing and security gates, the software is automatically accredited. So you can push software multiple times a day.”
Chaillan’s next goal is to complete training for all 100,000 employees who work on DoD applications. That may sound daunting, but as Chaillan points out, “We already took a team that had never done Kubernetes before, brought a few people in and trained them, put them off-base in a commercial building, and built the F-16 MVP within 45 days. That’s something that probably would have taken a year or two before.”
That was from a case study by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, “With Kubernetes, the US Department of Defense is enabling DevSecOps on F-16s and Battleships.”
Authority to Operate time is reduced from 12-32 weeks to one week. Time to access critical tools such as cloud, Kubernetes distribution, and so forth would take 3-6 months and that was reduced to one month. And the time to get a minimally viable product onto the F-16 would normally take more than 700 days was reduced to 45 (factor of 16).
These kinds of 5x or 10x improvements are the ones that really move the needle in delivering capability.
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